As I said hp should not get involved in making cheaper products.
They should concentrate on quality, premium products.
Yes it is always easy to jump in cheap competition but it can never earn value.
A super brand can not be born by cheap product.
HP is a premium brand name and should be continued with permium way.

They used to be quality lover.
Why shouldn't I go for lenovo if lenovo and hp offers same.
HP products were popular because they were hassle free simple and tough.
HP products were not feature rich but with outstanding features/specs.
HP should concentrate on reliability instead of being feature rich Chinese company.
Now a days buy a laptop or computer they wont guarantee it will work seamlessly but they can ensure you will get super service at service centres.
If I will have to visit service center every now and then it is better to go for cheap Chinese product so whenever I will face problem I will dump it and go for new which will be faster than waiting for services.

@Sheetal.Pandey: But its a developer's OS if you need to update something

Ubuntu can let you know when updates are available and apply them. The bigger issue is that it can take time for current releases to get added to Canonical's repositories. I added some PPAs to the software sources list Ubuntu looks at when checking for new releases to keep current.

and many websites features doesnt work well with UBuntu.

What browser are you using? I run Firefox as my browser, and every site I visit with Firefox in Windows works in Firefox in Ubuntu.

@Kaleb Craft: Lets toss an OS on here that works fine, but doesn't work with the majority of software you'll find in the box stores. Lets also hire the support to deal with the new learning curve of a new OS. While we're at it, lets just stop taking all this money from these vendors.

I've been a corporate IT guy, and an open source partisian.

I snicker at the notion that Linux has a future on the desktop, and have for about as long as people have been trumpeting it, despite the fact that I run Linux at home.

The fundamental problem Linux has on the desktop is that it's different. My experience in IT and support positions, starting in the 1980s in a mainframe shop and proceeding accross and down through mini-computers, super-micros, and personal computers has been consistent. People buy computers as tools to perform tasks. Once they have the tool, they learn just enough about it to perform the task, and stop.

Simply doing a corporate ugrade to a new version of Windows and Office can be painful, because it will require a learning curve on the part of the users. (A fair bit of my activities over the years have been efforts to simplify the user's environment and reduce what they had to know and learn to be able to use the tools I supported.)

A switch to Linux on the desktop is a "throw out the baby with the bathwater" operation, involving not only a new OS with a different UI, but a whole new set of applications as well. The user's reaction will be "I don't have time to get all my work done now, and you want me to learn a whole new set of ways to do it as well as getting it done?" They have a point.

I've successfully introduced open source software, but it has been in specific niches, like PuTTY as the standard telnet/ssh client, and Filezilla as the standard ftp client. Linux was in the mix, but in the server room doing things users didn't interact with directly and didn't need to learn about.

Ubuntu does about the best job I've seen of being a plausible desktop replacement for Windows, because it does the best at installing with next to no interaction needed with the user. But Canonical, who are behind Ubuntu, are using Ubuntu on the desktop as a marketing tool. They want to play in the same space Red Hat is. Red Hat Linux is open source, and the CentOS version can be obtained free. But the question corporate types will have about open source tools is "Who do we call if it breaks?", and Red Hat makes it's living being who they call, with supported commercial Linux installations. Canonical wants a piece of that selling supported Ubuntu server installations, and uses the desktop version to let people know about the server flavor.

Meanwhile, Linux can make good business sense, but that generally happens in places where the user may not be aware Linux is under the hood. My former Linksys router was one such. There was a Linux kernel, but the user dealt with a web page to configure it. The Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook eBook viewers are based on custom versions of Google Android, but the users likely don't know that. and there are a plethora of Android powered cell phones and tablets, but while the users know it's Android, how many are aware that Android uses a Linux kernel?

And we are slowly reaching the point where what the OS is may not matter. An enormous amount of stuff is out there is written in Java or Python, which are inherently cross platform, and will work the same on Windows, OS/X or Linux. The user increasingly doesn't have to care what the underlying OS is.

Oh I'm not saying that it is good. I'm explaining why companies aren't quick to get rid of it. Linux sounds like a great idea to you, but a horrid one from the business standpoint.

Lets toss an OS on here that works fine, but doesn't work with the majority of software you'll find in the box stores. Lets also hire the support to deal with the new learning curve of a new OS. While we're at it, lets just stop taking all this money from these vendors.

That is what goes through their mind. I personally used various flavors of linux for years on task specific machines (web servers, DNS, mail, proxies, file servers), but still enjoy Windows for my editing/gaming, etc.

@zewde yeraswork: I think, that among engineers there is a belief that if only engineers were running things, were completely in control of their own fate, most of their problems would go away. That is, as you say, wishful thinking, but it's a powerful sort of belief and one that is not likely to dissipate.

No, it won't. There are lots of powerful beliefs that can be conclusively disproven, but are clung to anyway, because they satisfy on an emotional level.

Part of the issue is the very different nature of the jobs of the engineer and the CEO. The engineer does engineering, designing products the company builds and sells. But the engineer is not normally the one that decides what products to design, build and sell. He gets his marching orders about what is needed from elsewhere. Product development is and must be customer driven. It doesn't matter how good the technology you develop is if it can't be used in a product customers will buy.

The fundamental job of the CEO is resource allocation. Development, manufacture, and sales of products requires capital investment, and in the case of high-tech firms, enormous capital investment. Top management at a firm are custodians of Other People's Money. The capital they invest comes from outside the firm, in the form of equity from stockholders purchasing stock, and debt in the form of loans, commercial paper and the like. Management has a fiduciary responsible to invest Other People's Money where it will get the greatest return. (If they are perceived as not doing so, they can be sued.) So final decisions on what products the company will design, build, and sell will be made by the CEO, based on his and his subordinate's best guesses on what the customers will buy, and resources will be allocated based on those guesses.

Another widely held mistaken notion revolves around the above, and concerns profitability. The usual assumption is that the company asks "What is the maximum profit we can make?" It's the wrong question. The right question is "How much profit do we have to make to survive and stay in business?", and the answer is simple: enough to cover the marginal cost of capital. The capital investment requirements of high tech companies are ferocious, and require high margins to fund. (For some companies, the answer to "How much do we have to make" is higher than the most optimistic answer to "What's the maximum we can make?", and they are in trouble.)

There are few cases I can think of where having an engineer at the top is a good idea. It worked for Hewlett and Packard, because they were engineers selling equipment that would be used by other engineers, and were selling to other businesses. I'd bet that only businesses selling technology to other technology oriented businesses might be candidates for having an engineer at the top, and that likelihood would progressively diminish as the company grew. (Note, for instance, that the current CEO of semi-conductor equipment maker Lam Research is a financial guy.)

It's not the responsibility of the CEO at a high-tech firm to be an engineer. It's his responsibility to insure the firm has top engineers working for it. He needs to understand enough about the technology the firm has and develops to know how it can be applied to customer needs, and he needs to deeply understand the customers and the market he is in. Most engineers simply can't do this. It's not their orientation or skill set. They're engineers, which is a different discipline.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.